There's this quote I keep thinking about every time I think about this blog and the way I let it fall away.
"But you know, success can test one's mettle as surely as the strongest adversary."
It's from Conan the Barbarian (1982, Crom laughs at your 2011 remake). I guess I always thought it was an interesting concept, but I never really thought about whether it was very true. Truth is, it's a bit exaggerated, but the general principle holds true.
The last three years, I've been... happy. It's strange. The world is on fire, people keep voting for obviously fraudulent madmen, climate change is becoming actually frightening, idiots are starting idiot wars. In a macro-sense, things are as bad as they've been in my 42 years. But personally... well... the best three years since university. Let's start by saying it was nothing to do with hard work: it was luck. My family is no longer with us, and despite or perhaps because of their determined frugality, I was able to sell my childhood home, buy a nice little house of my own without mortgage, and have a reasonable sum in savings. This in turn meant that I could go to four days work a week and travel abroad several times a year. End result... I'm happy. I wouldn't change that, but it did mean that I grew somewhat ill-disciplined in some areas. This blog was one of them. If I told you I didn't have the time or the energy, I'd be lying. I think that it was more the case that I was suddenly a bit drunk on my newfound freedom and reduced stress, and that sort of made me a bit... I don't quite want to say entitled, but it hooked me on feeling better about the world. Truth is, I didn't do my blog because I just didn't feel like it.
Now, there are some other considerations worth thinking about here. I think I was a bit of an idiot with Warhammer: Age of Rebuilding. I'm very proud of it as a body of work, but I think I should have actually ended it at the chapter 'Altdorf'. I have all these ideas for ongoing stories in the Age of Karl Franz, and I have written some since, but with that project I'd invited strangers to read it and get invested. Now, I've always been scrupulous about never allowing any adverts on this blog. I have never made a penny from AoR or anything else here. I never wanted that. I wanted it to be my passion project, and I certainly didn't want anyone getting the impression that I somehow owed them (didn't stop one or two people acting as if they were paying customers, but then some people are just morons). But bizarrely, when I saw the traffic stats on the project, I felt like I kind of did owe it to the people who had taken that time. Which on reflection is why I should maybe have left it at Altdorf: I'd given every faction a hook for the new age, and ended that chapter with a new status quo. I think it might have been arrogance to go on after that.
I had one overriding goal with AoR: stop people from talking about the Old World in the past tense. It's a fictional world: a corporate decision could not kill it if we didn't want it to die! I was a tiny part of a much broader effort, and in the end, the Old World proved so resilient that GW realised how daft they'd been to throw that market away. Warhammer: The Old World has now been back for almost three years. I'd have done some minor things differently, and as with all modern GW games, it suffers from their infuriating desire to constantly meddle with it, but in general I love it.
I am so happy that TOW exists. We showed, in the end, that there are no End Times. But it left me with two slightly absurd realities: first, my mission was obsolete. The Old World was back and supported. No more past tense. Also, all of those supplements I'd written were for a version of the game that wasn't going to be played that much anyway. Er!
I never made a decision to stop, per se, but other things got in the way, not least of all TOW itself!
Now... I'm not here to tell you that I'm back. I don't know, maybe I am. Maybe this is my final word on this blog. I'll carrying on writing my stories in the Age of Rebuilding. I doubt I'll be doing more custom rules. Maybe those stories will appear on here, maybe they'll just be for my friends. I just don't know that right now. What I do know is that despite the world's ills, I'm in the right place in life. The Old World lives, as we always hoped and believed it would be. I feel good about getting all this down.
Now, I must bid you adieu. The time of battle draws near, and the Empire needs heroes like never before!
